Re-scaling Governance in Berlin’s Creative Economy

The paper aims at discussing the issue of governance in respect to creative
scenes, a central structural element of the creative economy, exemplifying the
case of Berlin. Berlin has a fast growing creative industry that has become the
object of the city’s development policies and place marketing. The core question
is: What are the spatial-organizational driving forces of creativity in Berlin - can
they be steered by public administration? I am using Berlin as a reference case
to articulate the gap between ‘state-led planning’ on the one hand and the
organisational practices of self-governed creative scenes on the other. I attempt
to demonstrate why a perspective change in terms of re-scaling is necessary, in
order to respond to the particular practices of emerging industries and their
societal form “scenes”. By re-scaling I mean the conceptualization of governance
in different non-hierarchical organisational as well as spatial scales, based on
the observation that scenes are considered to be a central element of the
functionality of creative industries.